brainstorming meetings online

Prof. Toru Iijima

Who are we?

The Belle II collaboration consists of over 980 physicists and
engineers from 26 countries with the common goal of building
a new apparatus called Belle II and then analyzing its data.
The Belle II experiment will be
the first super B-Factory experiment and is designed to find
New Physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

We just want to discuss things

In Belle II, our many international
research groups and subgroups meet on a weekly or biweekly
basis and carry out about 1000 hours of meetings a month,
with many concurrent meetings from a few up to
50 remote participants each.

We needed an easy to use and robust teleconferencing system,
working on commonly available devices
such as Macs, PCs, tablets, and
smartphones. For us, the quality of audio and slides is very
important, since these are the carriers of the thoughts and ideas.

Why SpeakApp?

SpeakApp is the only solution — as far as I know — specifically
designed for scientific research groups, therefore a perfect fit
for us. It has a simple and intuitive user interface, which
lets us focus on the presented ideas with no distractions.

To store slides and presentations
we use CERN's Indico and Atlassian's Confluence systems.
SpeakApp makes these materials seamlessly available
at meetings. We can also download currently shown slides
straight from the screen. These features are very convenient.

Agility

During one of our collaboration General Meetings, there was a
failure in the other teleconferencing system
we use. There was a quick change over to SpeakApp allowed
remote members to take part in the tutorials, which needed
a screen sharing feature, not available in SpeakApp at that time.
The agile SpeakApp team added basic support for screen sharing
overnight to help us overcome the problem.

Bugs are fixed and new convenient features are sometimes added
before we even formally request them.
It is clear that the developers understand what the
community needs due to their own scientific background
as well as by paying attention to how Belle
II collaborators interact with SpeakApp.

Endorsement

With the robust and simple SpeakApp system
we can communicate efficiently and just focus on our work.